I Screwed Up!
Problems are not problems. They are subconscious patterns that need to be adjusted - Swami Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
“BIOCHEM IS IN”
My heart sank as I looked at the text from my friend telling me that our grades were in. I had walked out of the classroom knowing that my exam had not gone well. I unlocked my phone to check my grade, it was worse than I had expected. My eyes burned and I felt nauseous as a single thought crossed my mind, “Fuck! I am screwed.”
But this post is not about how to get a better grade, nor is it to baby me or you for setbacks, disappointments, or failures. This post is about how we react to these disappointments, setbacks and failures, these reactions stemming from desperation, panic and the need to coax ourselves.
If you find fault in your stars instead of your actions or yourself, the first step for you is to start taking responsibility. When we do take responsibility, we often react in one of two ways. We either try to numb our feelings of shame by wrecking our lives and ourselves. We express our disappointment and frustration in our personal relationships, let other habits dissolve into nothingness and picking habits which we might see fit for a ‘degenerate’ or a ‘loser.’
The second way we react is by having an all or nothing mentality. Taking my bad grade for instance. My first instinct is to throw myself into studying, forgetting everything else. Will it work? Probably. Is it the best way to go about it? Definitely not. Though I am all for having a one track mind and cutting out fluff from your life, and think it can be extremely beneficial for achieving your goals. The way we go about it as a reaction to disappointment or failure is never the right one, because this reaction is driven by fear, panic and a want to punish yourself. This cocktail of emotions makes our heads fuzzy, resulting in compromised planning and productivity, especially because it often leads to us cutting out essential aspects of our lives along with the fluff. On the other hand when we embrace the ‘one track mindset’ not as a reaction to fear and desperation, but as a conscious choice to propel ourselves towards our goal it produces. The goals is to trim our nails, not to chop off our fingers, while no fingers means no nails, fingers are important.
Dissecting a problem holds little value if it does pave way for solutions. Which is why I am going to lay out my plan to ‘pull up my socks’ as my school teachers would say, while you the reader who gets a sneak peek into my conversations with myself can pick what you find useful.
· The first step is to pick what do you want to work on, the less the better. This ties in with having a ‘one track mindset.’ My recommendation is to pick no more than three things at a given point, because no matter what we or other people tell us, you probably are not superhuman or have one in a billion willpower or energy levels.
· Trim your nails: The second step is to identify the things that are holding you back and cut them out. It is imperative to get rid of bias during this step, because there are things which don’t want to cut out but our one of the main reasons that are holding us back. If your weekly Netflix binge is responsible for your low grades, cancel your subscription, if videogaming for hours is costing you your relationship with your girlfriend, break-up (just kidding), cut out excessive gaming.
· What gets measured gets managed: The last is to note down the start and the stop time for each activity I engage in throughout the day for a couple of weeks. Along with that, at the end of each activity take note of any distractions you came across. At the end of two weeks look at the logs and determine where you are spending your time. Doing this for a couple of weeks will give you an answer to the question, ‘where is all my time going?’
I will leave with a quote by Swami Sivaya Subramuniyaswami “Problems are not problems. They are subconscious patterns that need to be adjusted.”
-Sartha
